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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "chatbot"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Fri, 1 Jul 2016 14:09:33 PDTChatbot Helps Drivers Appeal Over $4 Million In Bogus Parking TicketsTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160628/17163834853/chatbot-helps-drivers-appeal-over-4-million-bogus-parking-tickets.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160628/17163834853/chatbot-helps-drivers-appeal-over-4-million-bogus-parking-tickets.shtmlIn what is likely a sign of the coming government-rent-seeking apocalypse, a 19-year-old Stanford student from the UK has created a bot that assists users in challenging parking tickets. The inevitable result of parking nearly anywhere can now be handled with something other than a) meekly paying the fine or b) throwing them away until a bench warrant is issued.

In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over $4m of parking tickets.

Fighting parking tickets is a good place to start, considering most people aren't looking to retain representation when faced with questionable tickets. The route to a successful challenge isn't always straightforward, so it's obviously beneficial to have some guidance in this area -- especially guidance that can determine from a set of pre-generated questions where the flaw in the issued ticket might lie.

Anyone looking for an expansion of chatbots into trickier areas of criminal law are probably going to need to rein in their enthusiasm. There's not much at stake individually in challenging a traffic ticket. The 36% who haven't seen a successful appeal are no worse off than they were in the first place. But it's still better than simply assuming that paying the fine is the only option, especially when the ticket appears to be bogus.

Browder has plans for similar bot-based legal guidance in the future.

Browder’s next challenge for the AI lawyer is helping people with flight delay compensation, as well as helping the HIV positive understand their rights and acting as a guide for refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

The fight against airlines should prove interesting. Generally speaking, most airlines aren't willing to exchange their money for people's time, especially when the situation creating the delay is out of their hands -- which seems to be every situation, whether it's a snowstorm or a passenger confusing math with terrorism. But, if it proves as successful as Browder's first AI assistant, more grumbling from those whose business model has just been interfered with is on the way.

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100526/0700359584Mon, 9 Jun 2014 07:43:00 PDTNo, A 'Supercomputer' Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know BetterMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140609/07284327524/no-supercomputer-did-not-pass-turing-test-first-time-everyone-should-know-better.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140609/07284327524/no-supercomputer-did-not-pass-turing-test-first-time-everyone-should-know-better.shtmlthe press release from the University of Reading, which should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for any reporter. Here are some quotes, almost all of which are misleading or bogus:

The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday.

'Eugene', a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

[....] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let's dig in:

It's not a "supercomputer," it's a chatbot. It's a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It's just a chatbot.

Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have "passed" the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here's a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, "passing" the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.

It "beat" the Turing test here by "gaming" the rules -- by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.

The "rules" of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing's original test was quite different anyway.

As Chris Dixon points out, you don't get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That's just not how it's done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you'd wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?

The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it's fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If you've spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. He's been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the world's first "cyborg" for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a -- since taken down -- Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have "the first human infected with a computer virus." The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both "Captain Cyborg" and a "media strumpet" and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.

Basically, any reporter should view extraordinary claims associated with Warwick with extreme caution. But that's not what happened at all. Instead, as is all too typical with Warwick claims, the press went nutty over it, including publications that should know better. Here are just a few sample headlines. The absolute worst are the ones who claim this is a "supercomputer."

Anyway, a lot of hubbub over nothing special that everyone seemed to buy into because of the easy headlines (which is exactly what Warwick always counts on). So, since we just spent all this time on a useless nothing, let's end it with the obligatory xkcd: